Not that long ago we all shot slide film and that was the end product. If it was printed it was on CibaChrome papers and there wasn't a whole lot we could do other than give vague instructions to the printers.

The Nachtwey works always leave me almost unable to breathe, and seeing that passion, his continuing to live in the immensity and tragedy yet reality of it all is an entirely different world than the small, comfortable place we habituate in our society. This is powerful...and awakening ...and a call to another place.

Indebted to you for this check on our "reality". The extraordinary flow of understanding between the two of them is on another level all together. Thankyou for bringing this clip to the above discussions...something of relativity has hit me hard...

Powerful and disturbing imagery. Definitely art IMHO. Interesting that his goal is not so much to create images as to tell a story.Interesting to see the interaction between photographer and printer. Thanks for the post David.

It does indeed sound like the pictures ought to be known as "by Art Wolfe & Co". Nothing wrong in having assistants, but in this day and age, I think there is something wrong with not giving credit to those who make a masterpiece come alive.

In the film days we did it in the camera, mostly, at least using transparency film. There were of course master printers, translating an image on film to paper was an art of it's own. The darkroom artists seldom got the credits.

Lennart Nilsson made a lot of famous photographs and many were made on SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), those black and white came to live when printed by swedish master printer Gillis Hägg.

I hope you do not imply that doing it right in-camera is your definition of "how little"? Art Wolfe honed his skills in the film era, where you had to do it right at the moment of capture, thus he probably needs very little post-processing today.

I'll throw in the opposite challenge: how little can you do in-camera and still claim to be a photographer (and not photoshopographer™)?

Great vision and content always comes first. Once you have that, priniting and post processing can only try to make it better. Wihtout the former, the latter doesn't matter much. I think a few of you are focused in the wrong place when it comes to the talent that matters most... seeing!

If you are talking about art as in an expression of the individual’s form of vision, then that’s one thing, but you can’t fairly or intelligently cross over into the realm of commerce with that theory.

Professionals make images that someone else wants to buy. Whether those are printed or processed by another person doesn’t currently matter a whole lot in the general scheme of things: the deal is for a convincing and professionally sound product that fills the brief that gave it birth. The rest is immaterial. A war shooter has to reveal the pain and the fear and the events. An advertising photographer has to show the product or, as in the case of Pirelli, the myth surrounding the brand to best advantage or he doesn’t get paid and does, probably, have to claim on his insurance if he effs up. Reshoots don’t come for free. A paparazzo has the need to show celebrity as vulnerable or stupìd; a newspaper shooter is still saddled with a political agenda as much as was HC-B and also were his peers. Balaclavas owe their renaissance to the press photographers of ‘Fleet Street’.

Now, today, it’s debatable whether the commercial world currently allows any photographer to claim that his work is a true reflection of himself: there’s that character known as the art director who shares space with other part-players such as stylists and hair… almost forgot the client in that list; whose handwriting is the strongest? Is the photographer’s now the weakest?

In the past, countless people such as myself just got the job and then took off for the outside world with their model and maybe a coolie or two (you know what I meant, love…) and whatever came home with them, whether it was or was not the bacon, it was all their’s and the model’s. And everybody knew it. That was the time when personal style existed and you could look at Vogue or Playboy and reliably guess the snapper’s name without reading the credits. You look at those glossies today, or at top model agency sites, and they are all indistinguishably plastic, clones one of the other. It’s almost as if the name of the game is not to have a unique identity, but to share a common one: the era of the single ‘look’.

But, if you want to speak about, and if you identify art with the oeuvre of the single individual, then I believe you have the right to expect that whatever bears that person’s signature represents his own, personal, production: the fruit of his own sweat. Anything short of that, and I personally believe you are dealing with commerce and not art. And don’t forget that the Old Masters were commercial artists, probably every godddam one of ‘em.

As for the importance of the negative, print or ultimate file in representing the work of the artist (I exclude processing of transparency material because the objective there is for perfect standardization of process, which a good lab can usually do better than an individual), well there is no difference there from the situation with a paper print: the artefact is the image, the child of the mind of the producer. Introduce another personality into the process and you have the interesting situation of the cuckold: is baby a bastard or not? (In this instance you must overlook the discomfort to the innocents.) You could say that in the world of the collector, provenance is the genetic paternity test. And when you think of the money sometimes concerned, possibly even more important a distinction.

Thing is, honesty is really a very basic concept. There is no difficulty or ambiguity about it: something is or is not all your own work. Andy W. was honest: he himself called it The Factory. As with everything, the buyer should be left in no doubts about how or from where his purchase originates. And as ever, caveat emptor.

Your conclusion and ultimate belief regarding your position as artist depends on your interests in the matter, whether fiscal or simply based on your own ability to complete the various functions of artist, photographic or otherwise; level of ability colours much!

Perhaps there is also this aspect of an innate urge to express a message through an artistic medium combined with requirement of food for money to actually stay alive to be able to make that expression. Mozart produced a lot of music which certainly wasn't meant to be played or directed by only himself, but the exceptional pieces will likely stand the test of time for a quite a while yet. And I am not a Mozart fan by any means, but I do appreciate his lifetime productions.

Rob, you should give writing lessons. I could not have said it better. Untangling the personal creation of an artifact that is the artist versus a successful business. And I know artists have to eat but historically quite a few did not each much - for this reason I would guess.

Art is a master of the shot. He knows what animals are about to do. He is an expert mountain climber with the endurance to be out there when others give up. To me it makes perfect sense that he does what he enjoys.

Seems everyone after missed this. Voya Mitrovic printed for Bresson. And others, if I recall. It wasn't uncommon for photographers to work with others in having their prints made in the film days.

So true.

This thread has made me feel about 120 years old. It was not that long ago that there was little choice for most of us if we used color. And of course Henri Cartier-Bresson's lack of interest in printing his own photos is, or was, well-known. Nobody seemed to doubt his talents because of that. I am pretty sure that Josef Koudelka had others print at least some of his work too. I recall reading somewhere that the person who printed his famous photo of the horse and man in Romania 1968 http://bit.ly/12xSca6 had a very difficult time printing it as it appears. Edited to add, I just checked and found the Koudelka used the same printer as Bresson, Voja Mitrovic, and it was not only the horse photo that was difficult to print. See The Online Photographer: http://bit.ly/apEQfU

Frankly, if I were doing this for a living and could find someone to process mine to my standards for a reasonable fee, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Yes, of course it's often the norm to have others print your work; but that's not the same if your work is being touted as art rather than straight commerce; HC-B never, to my reading, ever claimed his photos were art, just good geometry. Which they were.